If only every single API in the world used REST. Representational State Transfer to be exact. It’s so brilliant, yet so simple. It’s one of those things that you look at and think, why the phuk wasn’t this thought of years ago? How could we have been so stupid. Why the phuk do I have to decrypt a WSDL file for Netsuite? Why in the world do I need struggle and spend my entire Sunday debugging the nusoap library because the SOAP headers aren’t properly formatted. Why?

Yes, I am pissed! When I take a look at Twitters API which utilizes the REST architecture, I can’t believe how easy it is. It’s natural language. I construct the URL based upon the info I am trying to receive, and by changing the extension I can control how I receive the response.

It’s so phuking simple: 

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/lakeshowonline.rss

That’s the Twitter timeline for lakeshowline. If I want to include the friend list, I change user_timeline to friend_timeline. If I want to pull a different user, I change lakeshowonline.rss to whatdaphuk.rss. Want a serialized JavaScript array instead of RSS? lakeshowonline.rss to lakeshowonline.json

Holy phuk, a 3 year old can do this. Will someone please euthanize the developer of SOAP and the god-awful WSDL?!? It’s unbelievable that this is now only coming into use via the Web 2.0 API’s. Why did we make Webservices (SOAP, XML-RPC) so complicated when it could be so easy? Then again, why is George Bush president?

Seriously, if your API isn’t utilizing REST, go phuking fix it.

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/ebizmba25.html

1. MySpace
2. Wikipedia
3. Youtube
4. Photobucket
5. Facebook

Huh?!? How did Photobucket beat Craigslist (#6). I have never searched for jobs or whores on Photobucket. What about Flickr (#7)? This just doesn't seem right. At least Wikipedia is up there. It might have some accuracy problems, but at least people are reading.